Many food products are packaged for retail sales in the form of prepackaged units of specified numbers of slices of the food product. Cheese and processed meat products are major examples of food products which are marketed in this manner. The packages are of a type which are fully sealed for protection of the contents during prolonged periods of storage and while on display in a retail store for selection by the customers.
Slicing machines have been devised and are commonly utilized in the food product industry to produce the sliced food products. While these machines are effective in producing the food product slices of a predetermined thickness, there still remains the procedural step of assembling those slices into a stacked group that may be readily placed into a packaging unit. It is highly desirable to fully automate the slicing and packaging operations to minimize the necessity of hand labor not only because of the cost, but for purposes of sanitation and meeting of regulations governing the processing and handling of food products for human consumption. Such automated systems in general comprise a slicing mechanism which is positioned in operative relationship to a packaging system.
In a typical system, a slicing machine cuts the food product into a number of slices in a single operation and the block of slices are then transferred to the packaging system where the block of slices is wrapped. Alternatively, slices are formed in a series and each of the slices is then wrapped and the wrapped slices are then assembled into a stack that is also wrapped as a unit.
While these previously devised systems and apparatus have been found adequate for merely effecting slicing and packaging of food products such as cheese, there are many food product processing operations were these systems and apparatus are either incapable of performing the desired operation or they are of undesirably slow functioning to meet economic operating standards. As a consequence, many food processes continue to utilize manual operations. One example is the packaged and frozen dinner in which food product slices are frequently applied to other food products such as a cheese slice applied over a meat or vegetable item. This operation has remained a manual operation with a worker applying the cheese slice to each conveyor transported container as it moves past the operator's station.